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Home > Personal Stories > Free Time > Dances in the 1950's
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Up until the 1950s, most young people went to dances at least once a week. Men and women danced fixed routines as couples and many took dancing lessons. People remember going to dances in local church halls, as well as in established clubs and dance nights at the City Hall, the Co-op buildings on Bellhouse Road, the Roxy and, best known of all, the Locarno.American servicemen stationed in Britain during the war, introduced a whole new style of dancing. The most popular dance was known as the Jitterbug - a wild and acrobatic jive which made the previously popular ballroom dances such as the Waltz and the Foxtrot appear rather dull and conservative. Many ballrooms had to ban Jitterbugging to protect their sprung floors. Click on the images to enlarge. |
The Locarno Ballroom on London Road was refitted in 1955 with 700 lights around the platform and an 85 ft by 38 ft maple floor. Image reproduced by kind permission of The Star. "I liked rock and roll and I went to the Locarno at the bottom of London Road. I can always remember the first time I walked in there because it had a black ceiling with little tiny white lights that came out and I thought it were heaven." Brenda Cawley "My ideal night out as a teenager was dancing. At the City Hall or Cutler's Hall even village halls. Anywhere as long as I were dancing." Winnie Barker "Things were a bit austere in the '50s so you sort of went out dancing or to the pictures and in the summer you went walking." Myra Hutton "There was no alcohol in dance halls. We drank orange. We didn't really have money to go out. We used to have to plan it to go in when so-and-so would go in and they'd buy us a glass. But it were all good fun. We didn't moan and groan about it. We used to have to walk everywhere. We couldn't afford to go on a tram." Alice Bebbington Memory Leaves which might be of interest:
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